The police took everyone to the station—except the bartenders, of course. The professor was whimpering and calling out for someone to massage his heart before it was too late. His girlfriend was holding a handkerchief up against Marat’s lacerated eyebrow. The professor and his girlfriend were sitting in one corner of the tiny cell, and we were sitting across from them. Nobody said anything; there was nothing but her nervous eyes, fixated on Marat, straining to parse every detail of his face, as though trying to memorize it. Then they were let go, but we had to stay. Marat asked me to use my one phone call on Alina to tell her that he had to report for a meeting with the president of the boxing federation.
“A meeting… at 2 a.m.?” I asked incredulously. “I’m gonna tell her we’re down at the police station. Shit, man, we’ve gotta get outta here somehow!”
“Us at the police station?” Marat seemed hesitant. “She won’t buy it—that’s too believable.”
“Why do we rehash things everyone already knows?” I thought. “Why do we curry favor with the dead by offering stories with so much blood and pain in them? It seems like everyone wants to remember Marat just that way—in red boxer shorts with angel wings on his back and the Lord’s benediction in his warm heart.” I finally decided to leave. I turned toward Sasha. I was about to excuse myself and dissolve into the fog when Alina leaned over toward me and touched my hand wearily.
“Hey, John, can you help me out over here?” she asked.
“Well, obviously, come on,” I answered.
“I shouldn’t even have come,” I thought to myself.
Alina started gathering up the empty bottles scattered in the grass, passing them to me, then she took some dishes and forks off the table and headed inside. I followed, sensing everyone’s eyes and voices behind me; I trod along the cracked bricks, amazed by how smoothly she moved, how deeply she plunged into the night, and how unexpectedly the light from the house’s windows fell on her skin and dark hair. She opened the door and went inside. I went in after her. She took a slow look around her, quietly asked me to leave the bottles in the hallway, and then handed me the forks. They slipped out of my hand and crashed to the floor, sharp and cold like shards of ice. Somewhere deep inside the house, a door creaked. Alina put a finger to her lips, signaling for me to keep it down, since everyone was already asleep. She spoke in a whisper, which gave her voice a peculiarly trusting tone. She opened the door to the living room and took a few cautious steps. The light was off; I didn’t see her so much as sense her—catching the sound of her breath, the slightly sharp walnut scent of her hair, and the slightly jarring creak of the old floorboards under her feet.
“What’s going to happen here in the dark when I accidentally bump into her, when I touch her in the void, when the forks and sharp knives in my hand wound her?” I thought. She passed through the living room and turned down a long hallway, finding her way by touch, her fingers groping from object to object. I knew this house—I played here as a kid. Its strange layout, which had changed a few times over the years, and its rooms cluttered with old furniture and tall cabinets reminded me of Marat, of slightly better circumstances, of the good old days. I’ve always liked the way it smells here—warm, comfortable clothing, wood, and tea. There were no books on the shelves, no pictures on the walls. Cramped rooms, narrow hallways, static shadows, invisible residents. We moved in the darkness, carefully weaving around chairs and bags, planters full of flowers, and shoes scattered across the floor. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t remember this hallway. It hadn’t been here before, and I should know, I’d been here hundreds of times at different ages and in different states of mind. But I had no memory of this hallway that stretched on and on, gradually narrowing, overflowing with dust and darkness.
“They must have just done some more renovations. Yeah, that’s it. Marat had been planning on knocking down this wall to merge his parents’ bedroom with the little room in which nobody lived, but I don’t remember him saying he was doing any remodeling the last time we talked.”
We hadn’t been doing much talking lately, though; I didn’t have the time, desire, or patience to put up with the haze Marat lived in. Maybe he had built this hallway in his parents’ dwelling so he could follow it out of this temporal world; he had broken open a channel of communication with the night, finding a place where the outer lining of the world was thin and permeable. He had finally taken advantage of this opportunity to set everything right. I stopped and listened hard. There was nothing to hear in that sheer darkness that enfolded and constricted everything; even Alina’s breath was gone, as though she had drawn a gulp of air into her lungs and held it until she dissolved into the darkness like a lump of sugar in pitch-black tea. She was playing hide-and-seek with me. I remembered how Marat liked telling stories about his dad, about how his dad taught him to swim. He just picked Marat up by the scruff of the neck and dunked him; Marat would flail his arms, gasping for air and coughing up water. He spoke of those lessons with great pride—“The thing is, I didn’t drown or go belly-up or anything. I kept my head above water. I lived to see another day, so now I know I’m gonna keep on holding it together—when death comes to take me, I won’t just roll over.”
But whenever he told those stories, his voice got so angry that it knocked the wind out of me. My mouth would suck in air greedily, trying to grab the oxygen out of it, as if I needed to make sure I wasn’t drowning. This trap I had fallen into was awakening all my worst childhood stories. Fear overcame me.